The Challenges of Home Working

Happy Friday! I have a guest post for you today from Janine, who is a member of The Money Shed forum.

Janine’s article is about the challenges of home working and her experience of the ways she’s found to make money. For anyone who hasn’t checked out The Money Shed yet, it’s a really good online forum in the UK about how to make money by working online and from home.

By the way, you might also be interested in my recently launched eBook about earning money from home, check it out here! Take it away, Janine…

Three months ago, shortly after giving birth to my third child, I realised that there was no way I was going to be able to manage being a mum as well as being a work-based employee. Anyone who’s had kids will know all too well the impact it has on your life, and how demanding being a parent is. I usually work part-time in the NHS, so can legally work the other part of my time whilst on maternity leave. I have another six months to see if I can make it alone being self-employed before having to decide whether I need to return to my old job.

Initially, when starting to research home working opportunities, I felt like a little fish in a big pond. There were lots of websites telling me that I could earn thousands from home and promising me riches, however when I looked into them most of them turned out to be scams and a quick fire way to lose money. I felt disheartened that there were so many people out there happy to do me over and steal my money. This disappointment went on for a while, until I found a couple of really good UK forum sites that gave fantastic advice about home working. The one that I have used the most is The Money Shed.  It’s a relatively new site, having only been set up in early 2014, yet it gave me so many different ideas about legitimate home-working opportunities that I’ve never looked back.

The initial easy ways of making money involve downloading three apps: Roamler, Field Agent and Voxpopme. These are real paying apps!! Most tasks for the first two apps involve going to a supermarket and doing price checks or audits. Sounds great I know, until you realise that there are a lot of other people living in your area all competing to reserve jobs before you. So the only way to make money from this is to be on the ball, checking the apps every hour, keeping an eye on their Facebook pages for upcoming work and being willing to drop everything when jobs are released. This is not easy with three kids and although I do tend to make about £100 a month at the moment, it would be much more if I had no childcare issues. Voxpopme is by far my favourite app and involves giving reviews by video – see The Money Shed Blog for more info on this.

I’ve also registered for a lot of mystery shopping companies, making sure I only went with those recommended on The Money Shed, as there are a lot of fake ones out there. However, yet again I found that many jobs quickly got taken, or you had to apply and potentially not get assigned jobs.

I’m lucky to have a grandparent who is willing to babysit for a couple of mornings a week from next month so I should be able to get started with a couple of other ideas. I’ve found a couple of sites that are looking for authors, where you need to write articles or text, such as Textbroker and Take Note. But again, I may not pass the recruitment tests, so can’t count on it as a reliable income. I’ve also found a blogging site that can earn you money called Bubblews, but haven’t had time to get stuck in yet. The Money Shed Forum has also introduced me to other more permanent ways of working from home, such as being employed as a call centre worker. However generally most jobs have a rolling contract, regular review dates, and the possibility of being let go.

So, it’s been a tough couple of months, and I can’t emphasise the amount of time I have spent just researching new ways to earn from home. Seriously, it would probably be close to 20 hours a week! So my best piece of advice would be to join a forum, be dedicated to putting a lot of hours in, and to be open minded about what type of work you could do. I’ve also resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to have to take a massive pay cut initially, until I build up my new skills in writing and mystery shopping, before I can make a decent amount of money from it.

Good luck and here’s hoping it works out for both of us.

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Editor’s note: Thanks to Janine for sharing her experiences of home working with us. Have a great weekend everyone!

*Image sourced by The Money Shed with text overlay by Disease Called Debt.